Another Change In Lakeview

If you are a fan of Mondo, you have until Saturday to enjoy it before it becomes another in a line of restaurants that have different characteristics, except one that they all share: they are good, but not good enough to last.

My earliest memory of a restaurant in that space is the Steak Knife, which has been going strong for forty years. The beloved Lakeview steakhouse started in that space and moved across the street when their renovation of an old bank building was completed.

Steak Knife was followed by Barataria, a really good restaurant that was washed away with Katrina. That one was followed by Lago, which opened a few years before Lakeview was fully up and operational as it is now,. It too was good, though a little less good than its predecessors, and after a few years it closed. The trickle back to normalcy that Lakeview experienced following Katrina may also be partly responsible for its demise.

There was real excitement when Susan Spicer moved into the space. Here would be a classy casual Lakeview hotspot with a name chef. And that name was a good one. Susan Spicer changed a lot about the space, and made the menu more eclectic. That’s a word that can politely describe her sometimes unusual style.

I have always been a vocal fan of Susan Spicer. I feel a special connection to her, since she last worked for me as a typesetter many years ago before embarking on her stellar career in the kitchen. Her menus make you want everything on them, and you are never disappointed. But I confess to never having been enthusiastic about Mondo.

My wife loved the burger, and the pizza, but those are her things, not mine, and the rest of the menu wasn’t all that interesting to me. Perhaps others felt the same way, or maybe her interests lie in her newer outpost Rosedale, another unusual place with eclectic food.

Either way, Mondo will be no more as of Saturday. We asked two friends who live in Lakeview about its departure from the scene. Both complained about more “kid-friendly” restaurants in Lakeview, but these are Baby Boomers. When asked specifically about Mondo, both shrugged and admitted that they liked it well enough, but didn’t go too much.